Countdown to a Lean Belly

How did they do it? That's the first question anyone asks when they see a friend or colleague who's lost a lot of weight, or remade their body into a healthier, leaner version. How did they do it?

Well, it's no mystery. In fact, one of the most important and intriguing studies ever conducted was put together by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) back in 2006. This is our tax dollars at work, and I'd say we got our money's worth.

The pages of the study—its catchy title is "Dietary and Physical Activity Behaviors Among Adults Successful at Weight Loss Maintenance"—take all the world's weight-loss theories and compare them to what works for real people in the real world. It looked at people who won the fat war by losing at least 30 pounds and then keeping the weight off using strategies that will work for you, too.

Keep in mind: It wasn't a 100 percent success story. The CDC studied 2,124 people, and only 587 of them actually lost the weight and kept it off. But those who succeeded used many of the same strategies, the strategies outlined here.

And for even more ways to revolutionize your diet and get lean for good, check out The Lean Belly Prescription by Dr. Travis Stork. It's filled with simple strategies that will help you lose weight the same way you gained it: By making easy lifestyle choices that will transform your life—for the better.

Lean-Belly Strategy #1Pay Attention to What You Eat Mindless eating is excessive eating. Researchers at the University of Massachusetts discovered that people who watched TV while they ate consumed nearly 300 more calories than those who dined without an eye on the tube. You need to pay attention to the messages your stomach is sending to your brain; if the TV is blaring, you won't see the "slow" and "stop" signs.

Lean-Belly Strategy #2 Slow Down Fast eaters become fat people. If you consciously stop to take a breath between bites, you can cut your food (and calorie) intake by 10 percent, according to researchers at the University of Rhode Island. Special bonus: You can do this in social situations—Thanksgiving dinner at Aunt Marge's—and nobody will even notice. That is, until you show up next year minus 20 pounds of flab.

Lean-Belly Strategy #3I Said Slow Down! It takes 20 minutes for the news that you've had enough to eat to travel from your gut to your brain. The reason: Hormones that trigger the "I'm full—stop!" sensation are at the end of your digestive tract, and it takes a while for digested food to reach there. If your mouth is filled with conversation, it won't be so full of food. Talk more between bites, and weigh less when the conversation/meal is over.

Lean-Belly Strategy #4Beware the "Healthy" Menu If you order the stuff that's supposed to be good for you, you're likely to underestimate a meal's calorie total by more than a third, according to a study in the Journal of Consumer Research. The restaurants know that; now you do, too. So be especially aware when ordering "healthy," and make sure you have a "to go" box handy to carry leftovers home.

Lean-Belly Strategy #5Beware the Community Chest Always serve snacks in a bowl or dish, and put away the packages. Never eat from the bag or container. That way you won't ever eat an entire bag of something in a single sitting.

Lean-Belly Strategy #6 Beat Hunger with Your Mind Have a craving even though you ate just an hour ago? Before you indulge your mystery hunger, here's how to test whether your appetite is real or not: Imagine sitting down to a large, sizzling steak. If you're truly hungry, the steak will sound good, and you should eat. If the steak isn't appetizing, it means your body isn't actually hungry. You might be bored, or thirsty, or just tempted by something you don't need. Try a change of scenery: Researchers at Flanders University in Australia found that visual distractions can help curb cravings.

Lean-Belly Strategy #7Redecorate, Repack, Remember If you don't have a countertop fruit bowl, buy one so you can grab a peach, banana, pear, or other piece of fruit on your way out the door in the morning, to munch on during your commute. (Plus, it's fun to throw the core out the window.) Plan a 10 a.m. apple-a-day break. Toss an orange in your briefcase to help you past the mid-afternoon lull (otherwise known as Temptation Time). Make fruit part of your entourage, and it will beat up lesser foods.

Lean-Belly Strategy #8If You Can't Bear to Eat Vegetables, Drink Them Instead That's right, you could have had a V8—as long as it was the low-sodium variety. It has pureed tomatoes, beets, carrots, celery, spinach, lettuce, parsley, and watercress, and 8 ounces supplies two of your five recommended daily servings of vegetables. It also heats up nicely as a base for soups.

Lean-Belly Strategy #9If You Can't Bear to Eat Vegetables, Hide Them in Your Pasta Sauce And no, neither you nor the kids will notice. Using a fine grater on your food processor, grate 2 cups total of onions, garlic, carrots, beets, and zucchini (or any combo thereof), then sauté the microscopic vegetable bits in a tablespoon of olive oil. Add 4 cups of basic marinara sauce and simmer to an anonymous tomato flavor.

Lean-Belly Strategy #10If You're Not Yet Drinking Smoothies, Why Not? Have you read the label of your fruit juice? Lots of sugar (however "natural" it is) and not much fiber, which means it's a carb bomb when it hits your bloodstream. Not so with a blended smoothie, because ingredient number one is whole fruit, making the sugar content drop and the fiber climb.

Two tips: Use frozen fruit; buy it by the bag in your store's freezer section. And buy a wand mixer and a small pitcher so you can mix your smoothie in the same container you drink it from; it's much easier than washing out a blender. Almost any fruit-and-berry combo will do, but you can start with this recipe: 1/2 cup frozen blueberries, 1/2 banana (peeled ones freeze well), 2 tablespoons peanut butter, 2 tablespoons whey powder (it's in the supplements aisle in the grocery store), 1 cup 2% milk, and 1 cup water.

Lean-Belly Strategy #11 Buy Smaller Dishes According to the food scientists at Cornell University, people tend to eat as much food as will fit on their plates. That's where "duh!" overlaps with dangerous. Over the past 100 years, our plates have grown, decade by decade. And we also know that the nation's obesity rates have grown exponentially in that time as well. No, it's not a coincidence. If you dine off of smaller plates, you'll grow smaller, too. Shoot for 9 inches in diameter, and you'll be on your way.

Lean-Belly Strategy #12Drink out of Skinny Glasses As have gone dinner plates, so have gone drinking glasses. And if you fill the newly cavernous ones with any kind of sweetened beverage, you'll overindulge in calories. But here's a smart tip: We tend to gauge our drink sizes by how tall, not how stout, our drinking glasses are. So if you buy tall, skinny ones, you'll think you're drinking more even though you're drinking less.

Lean-Belly Strategy #13Never Eat from the Box, Carton, or Bag Those same clever food scientists at Cornell did an experiment in which they gave one set of moviegoers giant boxes of stale popcorn and another set smaller boxes of stale popcorn. The big-box people ate more than the small-box people. The theory: You gauge the amount that's "reasonable" to eat by the size of the container it's in. Put two cookies on a plate, put a scoop of ice cream in a bowl, or lay out a small handful of potato chips on your plate, then put the container away; you'll eat far less of the treat.

Lean-Belly Strategy #14Limit the Fried Stuff Fun fact: Fast-food burgers and chicken from KFC and McDonald's are the most frequently requested meals on death row. It kinda makes sense. The inmates won't be around to suffer the aftermath. Fried foods are packed with calories and salt, and that crunchy, oily coating beats down any nutritional qualities that whatever is entombed inside might have.

That said, eating one piece of fried chicken won't be, um, a death sentence, if it's surrounded on the plate by generous helpings of vegetables and you follow with fruit—not more fat—for dessert. What's more, the fat in the chicken will help you absorb the fat-soluble vitamins in the veggies.

Lean-Belly Strategy #15Eat the Good Stuff Make sure your diet is filled with healthy fats in the forms of fatty fish (salmon, tuna, mackerel, sardines), fatty fruits (avocados), extra-virgin olive oil, eggs (among the healthiest foods known to humankind), and healthy-fat snacks (nuts are nutritional powerhouses and keep you feeling full). I even give bacon in moderation a green light; at only 70 calories per strip, it carries big flavor and belly-filling capabilities.

Lean-Belly Strategy #16 Wear Your Milk Mustache with Pride Milk, yogurt, cottage cheese, and cheeses all contain slow-to-digest protein and healthy fat, so they can be excellent belly fillers. And studies have suggested that the calcium in dairy products may aid weight loss. Make them part of your diet and you'll find the cow elbowing aside lesser members of the food kingdom.

Lean-Belly Strategy #17Eliminate Sweetened Beverages If you're going to follow only one piece of advice in this article, make it this one. I've said it before, but it's worth repeating: Drinks with added sugar account for nearly 450 calories per day in the average American's diet. That's more than twice as much as we were drinking 30 years ago. If you're looking for a way to cut unnecessary daily calories to help you lose a pound a week, wean yourself from the overload of sugar-sweetened carbonated beverages.

No, artificially sweetened sodas are not okay. Even if they have few calories or no calories, they maintain or increase your taste for highly sweetened foods, so you seek out the calorie payload elsewhere. Worse yet, they crowd out the healthy beverages. My prescription: Out with the bad, in with the great—in taste and nutrition.

Lean-Belly Strategy #18Reduce Your Intake of High-Carbohydrate Foods As I've mentioned, simple carbs enter your bloodstream as sugars and are likely to be stored as fat when you're inactive. They also set off a binge/crash cycle that can give your appetite the upper hand and have you reaching for the doughnut tray and candy bars throughout your day. To rein in your appetite, limit your simple carbs found in sugary drinks, processed foods, and refined breads (i.e., whole-wheat bread carbs good, white bread carbs bad; strawberry carbs good, strawberry-flavored candy carbs bad).

Lean-Belly Strategy #19Reduce Your Intake of Food Prepared Away From Home When you let somebody else prepare your food—especially if it's a teenager in a paper hat—you lose control over what you eat. And the fast-food companies, being what they are, encourage all of your worst eating habits by stuffing their products with crave-inducing ingredients like unhealthy fats, sugar, and salt. If you can stay out of the drive-thru, you can shrink your calorie intake every day.

Lean-Belly Strategy #20Keep a Food Diary Clearly, this weight-loss technique isn't for everybody. It's a hassle to write down every little thing you eat, day after day. But it's strikingly effective for those who do it. My advice: Try it for a week so you can get a handle on how many sodas you drink and under what circumstances, when you're most likely to veg out with a bowl of chips in front of the TV, and when your dessert cravings strike. That will help you identify your dietary danger zones and lead you to strategies that save pounds.

But it wasn't just dietary changes that helped all those folks lose all that weight. Becoming active was another enormous factor in leading the successful losers into the promised land of the lean (but not hungry): exercising for 30 or more minutes per day, and adding physical activity to daily routines. Clearly, these are Lean Belly Prescription kind of people. And that provides a great segue to talking about the activities that these "successful losers" used to shed fat and keep it off .

Here's why it's so important to keep both healthy eating and exercise going as your one-two punch against belly fat. A study published in the Journal of Applied Physiology reported that when people chose healthier foods and combined that benefi t with exercise, they torched 98 percent of their weight directly from their fat stores. People who changed their diets alone were much more likely to break down muscle for fuel, and that's a big problem. Muscle is one of your prime metabolism boosters, so it will help you burn fat for up to 24 hours after a workout. So let's tackle the activity list, and give you strategies to make the most of it.

Lean-Belly Strategy #21Walk for Exercise I consider that great news. Is there a simpler exercise than walking? Is there a better way to incorporate talking with friends and loved ones into your fitness plan? Is there anything else that gets you out among your neighbors at a pace that lets you say hello? And is there anything that makes your dog happier than your saying the magic word walk?

A study from the University of Prince Edward Island in Canada (a lovely place for a walk, mind you) found that largely sedentary people who wore a pedometer for 12 weeks increased their total steps by 3,451 a day, to about 10,500. By walking more, they also lowered their resting heart rates, BMIs, and waist measurements. Once you start paying attention to footsteps, you'll find ways to bank the extra strides. Thirty here, 300 there, 1,000 after dinner, and suddenly you're walking away from your old weight. Why not start right now? The closer you pay attention, the more you'll walk. And the more you walk, the greater the temptation will be to mix in an even bigger calorie burner: running.

Lean-Belly Strategy #22Lift Weights I suspect that for 81 percent of you, the picture that just flashed in your mind was of a no-neck Bulgarian weight lifter straining as he hoisted a steel beam over his head in the last Olympics. I know that isn't you.

But you should still be taking advantage of the weight lifter's advantage: Muscle is the all-night convenience store of fat burning—it never shuts down. Not only do you burn a ton of calories while you're actually exercising, but there's also a big afterburn effect that kicks in. Your body has to expend energy to cool you down and repair the small tears in muscle fibers that happen when you lift. (Don't freak out. If you lift reasonable-size weights, you won't tear muscles, you'll just push the muscle fibers hard enough to make them grow.)

Lean-Belly Strategy #23Exercise Regularly Believe it or not, "none of the above" is a legitimate option when it comes to physical activity, because there's nothing magical about running or weight lifting or even walking. They're just the most common activities people choose in order to add more activity to their days. The only one that's important to you is one that a) you enjoy, b) fits into your life well enough that you can do it most days, and c) allows you to up your energy expenditure.

You can do that by adding three 15-minute walks to your day or by scheduling 2-hour bike rides on weekends. Or simply by walking more, standing more, lifting more, and sitting less.

Just look at your whole day as an opportunity to make the smart choices that will help you lose weight and feel better. Achieve that, and where might you be next month? Or next year? Some place far better than where you are today!

A Part of Hearst Digital Media
Men's Health participates in various affiliate marketing programs, which means we may get paid commissions on editorially chosen products purchased through our links to retailer sites.